


The Steerswoman's Trail

by keerawa



Category: Steerswoman Series - Rosemary Kirstein
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Book 3: The Lost Steerswoman, Cultural Differences, F/F, Misses Clause Challenge, Yuletide, Yuletide 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-09 09:36:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8885842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keerawa/pseuds/keerawa
Summary: Nine months ago Rowan left the Outskirts, searching for the wizard Slado.  Now, Bel is finally free to follow her.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silly_cleo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silly_cleo/gifts).



> My thanks to Kate Nepveu for the thoughtful beta.

Bel sat cross-legged on the ground, waiting. The campsite she had chosen was on a major caravan route, and showed signs of use within the last seven-day. Bel predicted another caravan would pass within the next few days. 

She fought down the prickling need to be up and moving. To start walking south after Rowan; to run after her. It was better to wait for a caravan. Safer, certainly. Bel was alone, with no one to keep watch while she slept. The Inner Lands were tame and easy compared to the Outskirts, but there were still bandits, wolves, and wizard’s minions who might take her unaware.

Bel watched the trees, their green leaves strange and new to her again after her time in the Outskirts. She felt half-deaf, missing the rattling hiss of the redgrass in the wind, revealing its secrets only to the most skilled. Her senses focused on sounds of birds and the wind in the trees, the rushing water of the creek. Any break in the pattern could mean danger.

The patchwork cloak and goat hide boots that marked her as an Outskirter were hidden in her pack. She’d replaced them with a coat and light leather shoes she’d stolen from the first village she passed through on the boundary between the Outskirts and Inner Lands. She’d marveled once again at the sight of them in their permanent little wooden houses, huddled around their hearths as if fire were a protective charm rather than a beacon to goblins and every creature of the dark.

The steerswomen made sense to Bel. They had their own code of honor. They trained their young and sent them on walkabout to observe every detail they could about the natural world and the people in it, documenting their findings. Once steerswomen were too old or too wounded for the road, they returned home to join the elders at the Archives, crossing over like any good mertutial, to study and annotate, debate and correlate, expanding and enriching their tribe’s knowledge of the world. Knowledge was their food and drink, truth their weapon. Put in those terms, any Outskirter could understand and admire them.

The rest of the Inner Landers, on the other hand, were a mystery. They took their safety and full bellies for granted. Inner Landers were preoccupied with matters that struck Bel as childish and petty. Most of them never traveled more than a day's walk from where they'd been born. They allowed themselves to be ruled by wizards; their were goods stolen, their people drafted into meaningless battles against other wizards' troops. They reminded Bel of sheep, helpless creatures eating the green grass in their pasture to the roots and then baa'ing mournfully at the grass outside the fence, rather than the brave and wily goats that were her people’s treasure.

And yet, Bel had seen signs of greatness in them. Seen it in sailors and in villagers, in dukes and in chamber maids, in a blacksmith’s son who had taught himself magic to seek revenge on the wizard who had stolen his little sister. 

Bel did not yet understand what stirred the hearts of the Inner Landers. And that made traveling with a caravan a necessity. Bel needed to learn the rhythms of their stories, the ways of their gods and demons, heroes and villains. She needed to know the Inner Landers like a mother knows her children, a herd-master his goats. Because Bel was composing a story for them.

The poem Bel had created for her own people had been a masterpiece six months in the making. It took the form of all true poems: alliterative, unrhymed, with a caesura in each line. It was a story of small people standing together against the powerful. It was a tale that began with a woman whose curiosity about a handful of blue gems made her the target of every wizard in the world, and ended with a call to arms. Bel had taught that poem to dozens of men and women from different tribes, and they had spread it across the Outskirts. It had made Bel the leader of her people, her three names the password to a force the likes of which their world had never seen.

Only Rowan, with her clear sight and unique leaps of logic, could find the wizard Slado and determine how best to eliminate him. Only Bel could rouse the sleeping Inner Lands and unite them with the people of the Outskirts, a tangleroot sword edged in steel.

All it would take was the right story.

A pair of starlings took flight to the north, along the caravan route. Bel stood and stretched, ready to greet the first of the caravan guards with a smile and a glib tale that would earn her a place among them for the long journey to the sea.

* * *

The guards protecting Alemeth, where Rowan’s message said she’d be found, were a surprise. Battle-tested and battle-scarred, they summoned the captain of the guard the moment Bel stepped foot on the dock, recognizing her as a threat.

Rowan’s name was familiar to them – the captain relaxed when he heard it, but others in the guard troop tensed and glared at her with renewed suspicion. It seemed Bel had missed Rowan by a matter of days.

She decided to stay overnight in Alemeth, before continuing her journey. The delay was painful, knowing that her friend had gone demon-hunting without a warrior to watch her back, but it was necessary. Bel’s story was incomplete, as was her poem. The poem ended mid-stanza, with Rowan setting out to track the wizard Slado to his lair; the interruption a mark of a life still being lived, its ending unknown. 

Rowan was detailed and precise in relating information, but she was no story-teller. Ask Rowan about a great battle; she’d describe the landmarks, the fighter’s clothing, and a blow-by-blow of each attack and counter-attack down the slightest detail, without a hint of how the blood pumped and the heart soared and the screams of the wounded carried into the uncaring sky. 

And so, Bel spent some coin in Alemeth, buying people drinks and asking them about Rowan. Bel chuckled when a sour-faced woman described Rowan’s absolute dedication to her duties as keeper of the books of the Annex and her complete inability to maintain her duties as a hostess. An elderly man expressed his disapproval of Rowan’s habit of carrying her sword with her at all times, and told Bel that the children kept their distance since Rowan drew on a group of them who had ambushed her in the dark for a prank.

The hum of a hunting demon was a sound that could reduce a tribe to terrified stillness, waiting for the danger to pass. Bel was not surprised that Rowan had led one to the edge of the town, determined its vulnerabilities, and helped the city guard destroy it. She was not surprised at all. But she was proud. 

The demon attacks had continued and intensified, with multiple demons attacking the town at the same time. Rowan had defeated one with a single bowman, Arvin, at her side. Bel bought him a meal in addition to the promised drink, sharing meat with him as Rowan’s sword-brother.

One more attack had occurred while Rowan was out of town – that one had had over a dozen demons hunting together, strong and fit, having eaten other demons during the journey. They had captured a man by the name of Janus and carried him away. 

Bel tried to make sense of this tale. Demons were known as solitary hunters. Were they operating like a troop of goblin jills? No – a desperate warband of Face People, traveling across the blackgrass prairie, their herd left behind with the mertutials and children, nothing to eat but each other. She shivered at the thought. 

Rumor described the demon-snatched man as Rowan’s sweetheart. Apparently, her sailing out to rescue him, even after they had quarreled, was the sign of a great romance. That was as it may be, but Bel remembered Janus as the name of the steersman who had first disappeared, then resigned under ban for refusing to answer another steerswoman’s questions. She found herself taking a dislike to the man, sight unseen. Not only because of Rowan’s attachment to him. Although ... first a wizard's minion, and now a banned former-steersman? Rowan’s taste in men was poor enough to be comic, if you didn't know how deeply Fletcher's betrayal had hurt her.

Bel was reminded of the awful moment when she'd seen Rowan reach out, off balance, and rest all her weight on the crumbling surface of a lichen-tower. Bel had warned Rowan about lichen-towers. Of course she had. But you can't protect someone from the pain of their own mistakes. The razor wire and piercing spines that made up the tower's internal structure had left permanent scars.

Janus had told people that Rowan was no steerswoman. The first young woman brave enough, or stupid enough, to repeat that in Bel’s hearing had blanched at the look on Bel’s face and abandoned her ale on the bar in a quick exit. Knowledge was life, to the steerswomen, and Janus had _lied_. There was a dishonor to it, a bone-deep wrong, as if a herd-master had taken the goat-craft passed down to her through the generations and used it to poison her charges.

No man who could do such a thing deserved Rowan’s attention. 

Bel was jealous. She could admit that, if only to herself. 

The memory of Rowan calling out instructions while locked in battle with dragons, calm, clever, and deadly, still left Bel breathless. Bel put herself to sleep remembering Rowan on her knees, eyes intent and voice alive, biting her lip as she drew pictures in the dirt that showed how a Guidestar might be always falling, but never hit the ground. The memory of her touch as she gently guided Bel’s hand through the letters of the alphabet, over and over, writing both of their names on paper, side by side, had inspired Bel’s hands as she touched herself in the night.

If Rowan had been a woman of her tribe, Bel would have courted her. They would have long since shared their bodies, a tent, a blood-bond. They’d be arguing the merits of the various scouts of the outer circle they might ask to sire a child. Men of the tribe who were strong and intelligent, but without the opportunity or inclination to court a woman; men unlikely to survive long enough to continue their line. But Bel had not seen any blood-bonded women, or men for that matter, among the Inner Lands. Perhaps it was not done. Perhaps, even if it were possible, Rowan was not so inclined. 

Bel could ask, of course, and Rowan would answer truthfully. Bel could have asked her at any time in the past years. But fear had stopped her tongue. No more, she vowed. She would find Rowan and then, once they were safe, she would ask for the truth.

There was a woman by the name of Gwen staying at the Annex. She answered the door civilly enough, telling her that the steerswoman was away. When Bel asked to see the map that Rowan had used to plan her trip to through the demon lands, Gwen told her there was no such map.

“A steerswoman doesn’t take a trip to the cessfields without a map, and Rowan would have left the original here at the Annex,” Bel insisted. 

Gwen let her in, muttering under her breath about barbarians and what Old Mira would have done about this.

The map sat in the center of a great wooden table, along with a series of Rowan’s log entries about the anatomy and habits of demons and a brief note written in an unfamiliar hand describing their plans to sail east in Janus’ copper-bottomed boat, as indicated on the map, searching for the wizard’s fortress at each of the numbered locations.

Bel stayed overnight in the inn, and then tried to hire a ship the next morning to take her east. When they all refused, she charmed her way onboard a small ship with a saucy wink and a sway of the hips, then dropped the act and told the fishermen they'd sail east or die slow.

She’d chosen a fast ship, and at first she thought they might catch up to Rowan. She spotted what must be the sails of Rowan’s ship on the horizon several times in clear weather. But as they approached the part of the sea marked _little snails_ on the map, the fishermen became more afraid of the sea than they were of her. They brought her to shore, and she began to walk. 

Bel walked fast, a ground-eating pace that she could keep up for weeks at a time. She could; she did. It was the pace of a forced march for the tribe, pushing through danger to safety – possessions abandoned, children carried, elderly and wounded left behind if they could not keep up. Bel felt, sometimes, that the desperate march she had begun in escaping the killing heat of Slado’s _Routine Bioform Clearance_ spell had never ended. Bel had marched across the Outskirts warning and rallying her people against Slado, across the Inner Lands, across the sea and back and now into the Demon Lands.

If this was battle, it was on unfamiliar ground, against a faceless and all-powerful enemy who could call down death from the sky, without warning. Bel had done all she could, but she could not fight the wizard herself. Only Rowan could put together the pieces, could fight magic with wits and resolve and truth.

She finally spotted the sails of Rowan’s ship, anchored in shallow water, and marched towards it. Rowan was not there. A steerswoman, Zenna, and Janus himself, greeted her and offered food and water. Zenna was missing a leg. Janus’ sword hand was maimed, missing all five fingers. _Mertutials_ , her instincts whispered, _not a threat_.

“Tell me, lady,” Bel growled, her voice hoarse from disuse. “Where can I find Rowan?”

Bel gathered a week’s supplies and followed Rowan down the cliffs of the Dolphin Stair. Her march to the campsite where Janus claimed to have left Rowan, wounded and unable to continue, passed in a blur. The beach was strange, a mix of Outskirter, Inner Lands and sea that Rowan would have loved to study. 

One more day to the campsite. There was a figure slumped on the ground. Bel broke into a trot, mind rattling through what lore she possessed about the care of wounds. It was not Rowan. There was a young man sitting there, knees to his chin, staring out at the sea.

“She’s not here,” he said dumbly. Steffie, it must be Steffie. Zenna had said he had gone after Rowan.

Bel searched frantically through the strange little mud houses. There were signs of Rowan’s presence – dirty bandages, a water bottle, ashes from a fire only a few days old. She found the ‘crypt’, skulls of the dead peering out through little windows at the world, and barked a laugh. Of course. How poetic. Outskirters cast their dead, chopping them to pieces and spreading the remains across steppe and prairie as a final victory over the land. Inner Landers, even dead, were huddling together for safety, hiding from the land that killed them.

It wasn’t in Rowan’s nature to hide.

Bel took three slow, steady breaths and then climbed to the top of the cairn, studying the horizon in all directions. No sign of her. She moved to the center of the campsite and began walking a search spiral, eyes on the ground for any trace of Rowan.

Bel had no gift for tracking, but her father had taught her this much. After he was a scout, before he was seyoh of the tribe, her father watched the herds. She remembered him pointing out crushed strands of redgrass as they walked the spiral, searching for a lost kid. There. A deep gouge in the sand, perhaps left by a walking stick. A dragging footstep. Rowan was headed inland.

“Steffie! Bring supplies, I’ve found her trail,” Bel ordered, not taking her eyes of the marks. It took a great many starts and stops and backtracks, but they followed the evidence of Rowan’s passage through the sand dunes into a mix of green grass and red. They found her walking stick. The trail was easy to follow after that – she was crawling, her wounded leg dripping a mix of blood and fluids onto the ground.

Bel heard her before she saw her. Rowan was lecturing some invisible audience, in between sobs of pain, raving about voiceless people and faceless people and murderers. Bel tracked the sound to where Rowan lay on her side, struggling to get back up. The infection in Rowan’s leg had spread through her body. She was feverish and dangerously dehydrated. Bel had to sit on her to get her to stay still. 

“Hold on, Bel,” Rowan said dazedly, “I just need to finish answering this question.” 

And it was so very much her, Bel found herself on the verge of tears. It wasn’t until Steffie managed to pour some water into her mouth that Rowan showed any sign of awareness.

“You’re real,” Rowan said, looking absolutely delighted. That was the most sense they would get out of her for weeks.

* * *

Janus was a liar. Bel already knew this, of course. It was nearly the first thing she had ever learned about him. But this proved it.

Janus, unlike Rowan, was an excellent story-teller. His tale of how Rowan had rescued him from the wizard’s fortress captivated the three of them for days as they cared for Rowan and sailed back west, towards Alemeth. Zenna asked hundreds of questions and took copious notes, as if every word of it was true. 

It wasn’t. The Rowan in Janus’ tale was brave, and clever, and loyal. Only, it wasn’t _her_ Rowan. Her Rowan would have killed the single wizard’s minion standing between them and freedom, quick and silent, rather than risking trying to sneak past him. Her Rowan hadn’t mastered the Outskirter’s trick of sleeping upright, but she slept light and woke with sword in hand, ready to defend the tribe. She would never have slept through the hum of an approaching demon.

Lies on top of lies, on top of still more lies. Bel smiled at Janus, and kept her sword close to hand. She waited for Rowan to either wake up and tell them the truth, or to die with her story untold. If the latter, Bel would force the truth out of Janus. He only had one working hand. A threat against it would focus his mind admirably. 

Zenna proclaimed that Rowan’s fever had broken, and that she was on the mend. Janus jumped ship that night. Bel weighed her desire to see his entrails against her need to be there when Rowan woke up, and let him go.

“Have I mentioned,” Rowan said that night, grinning, “how very glad I am to see you?”

Bel nodded. “Every time you woke up. At first it was flattering, but then it got to be embarrassing.” Every time. ‘I missed you,’ Rowan would say, and ‘I love you,’ and while Bel knew that steerswomen always told the truth, mixed in with her other ravings, it was hard to know what to think.

Rowan laughed. “Well, I don’t remember it.” She paused. “Oh dear.”

Even if it was true, a dying warrior might say things on her last day that she would never admit to, knowing she would see another dawn. 

Bel had to know. “Tell me, lady - is it possible for two women to marry, in the Inner Lands?”

Rowan began to answer automatically, her mind otherwise engaged. Then her gaze sharpened. She looked up at Bel with the clear and singular focus that was her unique gift. 

“Customs differ greatly from region to region,” Rowan answered, “but such pairings are respected among the steerswomen. Why do you ask?”

Bel leaned forward and took a breath, the fear rising up in her once again.

“On second thought,” Rowan interrupted, “Don’t tell me. I’ll reason this one through myself.” Rowan’s voice was solemn, but her eyes danced warmly. “Now why would Bel ask me that particular question? Possibilities are three…”

And while the Inner Lands version of the story skips ahead to their arrival in Donner, the tender stanzas of the poem that follow are a favorite among the Outskirters.


End file.
